While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's daughter he was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon," but Shelley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer years. The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future society, and he describes that poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of history" (i. p. 55).]
All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"—now sufficiently tarnished—together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of doctrinaire statements.
The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the poet of perfectibility.
8.
The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.
The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently invented in England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique. The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time; Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in practical politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that institutions and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice. That is pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from the revolutionary doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the nineteenth century.
Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it. His numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation of his gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of the human character, preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind," which he dedicated to the Prince Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The Essays had appeared separately in 1813-14.] Here he lays down that "any general character, from the best to the worst, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men." [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually harps is that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that men are responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their actions and characters. These result from education and institutions, and can be transformed automatically by transforming those agencies. Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse his theories. The first number of the New Moral World (1834-36) [Footnote: This was not a journal, but a series of pamphlets which appeared in 1836-1844. Other publications of Owen were: Outline of the Rational System of Society (6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race, or the coming change from Irrationality to Rationality (1849); The Future of the Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful Revolution, near at hand, to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of Man upon Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an ideal society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no charity—a system "which will ensure the happiness of the human race throughout all future ages," to replace one "which, so long as it shall be maintained, must produce misery to all." His own experimental attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in America proved a ludicrous failure.
It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception of Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its significance. If the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by a certain arrangement of society, the goal of development is achieved; we shall have reached the term, and shall have only to live in and enjoy the ideal state—a menagerie of happy men. There will be room for further, perhaps indefinite, advance in knowledge, but civilisation in its social character becomes stable and rigid. Once man's needs are perfectly satisfied in a harmonious environment there is no stimulus to cause further changes, and the dynamic character of history disappears.
Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct types, corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and appealing to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers of "the city of gold," which they imagine as situated just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known and is within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far and by a further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development is indefinite; its term is unknown, and lies in the remote future. Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding political theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine naturally leads to a symmetrical system in which the authority of the state is preponderant, and the individual has little more value than a cog in a well-oiled wheel: his place is assigned; it is not his right to go his own way. Of this type the principal example that is not socialistic is, as we shall see, the philosophy of Comte.